Degrees of Separation
by Elsha
Summary: Years after A Risk Worth Taking, Brenna Nott starts asking questions about the grandfather she's never met.


A/N: This story ended up being written because of _A Risk Worth Taking_. I began to wonder exactly how Theodore would address the situation of a missing grandparent, and how it would seem to a child for whom the war was another generation's problem. There are no HBP spoilers, mainly because nothing in that contradicted anything in this.

Degrees of Separation

Brenna was six when she asked why she didn't have a grandfather. Oh, she had one - her Mum's father. And she had a grandmother, Grandma Mary. And her Dad's mother had died when her dad was little, Grandmother Adrienne, so of course she didn't know her. Aunt Monique (she hated being called great-aunt) told her stories about Grandmother Adrienne. But no one except Dad ever talked about her other grandfather. She knew his name was Eric. And she knew little things about him, things her father had told her. Stories from when _her_ father was little. But she didn't know where Grandfather Eric was. Or why she'd never met him.

So she asked her mother. Her mother knew lots of things.

She went downstairs, not too fast, because she'd tripped on those stairs before and it hurt. Her mother was in the old dining room, writing. Sometimes she brought things from work home, and then she wrote them in the old dining room, because the table was really big. So was the kitchen table, but they ate at the kitchen table and used it to do things. Like paint. Painting was messy.

"Mum?" Brenna asked, from the doorway. "Can I ask you a question?"

Her mother put her quill down. "Of course. What is it, Brenna?"

"How did my grandfather Eric die?"

It scared her, how fast her mother's face changed. One minute smiling and listening, because Mum was good at listening when you had questions or stories; the next minute, blank. Like Dad, sometimes, when he read the paper and read something he didn't like. Brenna tried to read those articles, because she could read pretty well now, but they usually talked about things she didn't understand.

"Mum?"

"He's not dead," Mum said, very quietly.

Brenna couldn't help jumping. "Really? Can I meet him? Why doesn't he come and visit?"

Mum shook her head. Brenna felt her stomach twist. Mum looked sad, and that was never good. "No, love. He...oh...you'd better ask your father."

"Why? Don't you know? Why can't you tell me?"

"It isn't my story," Mum said simply. "It's your father's. Ask him. I don't want to tell it to you...to tell it wrong."

So Brenna asked Dad.

He looked at her for the longest time, before standing up and walking over to the piano. There were lots of photos on it; photos of Brenna and her brother and sister and everyone else in her family. One of them was of her grandfather Eric, she knew.

"Did you fight with him?" she said.

He nodded. "It was a very long time ago, Brenna. A long time before you were born."

"What did you fight about?"

His jaw tightened, and Brenna bit her lip. Maybe she shouldn't have asked.

"Ah...it's a long story, Brenna. We argued about...about magic, and...people who don't have magic."

"You mean Muggles? Like Grandpa Jon and Grandma Mary and Uncle Eddie and Auntie Nicola?"

"Just like them." He turned, swiftly, back to the couch. "My father...doesn't like Muggles. We argued about that."

"Oh." Brenna digested this. It didn't make very much sense. "That's sort of silly. Why didn't he like them? They're really nice. They're Mum's family."

"He never met them. It was...more general. Brenna...you have to remember they're your family, too."

Dad wasn't making any sense at _all_. "I know _that,_ Dad."

"Good." He ruffled her hair. "Don't forget it."

* * *

When she was eight, she learned that her grandfather had been a Death Eater. She didn't know what that meant, so she asked her Aunt Monique, who happened to be the closest adult.

"Aunt Monique?" she said politely, tugging on her sleeve. "What's a Death Eater?"

It was a family Christmas party, and Aunt Monique was talking to Dave, who was married to Jan, who was Dad's cousin. Both of them froze.

"Why do you want to know that, dear?" Great-Aunt Monique replied. Dave's eyebrows were raised, and he was staring at her. Brenna blushed.

"It's just something Evan said."

"Oh, _did_ he?" Aunt Monique sounded thoughtful. Or maybe angry. "What did he say, exactly?"

"We were looking at the photos on the piano, and he asked why there was a photo of my grandfather Eric, and I asked if he knew him, and he said of course not because he was a Death Eater. People always say that, but no one ever says what a Death Eater _is_. I know they must be bad, or people wouldn't not tell me, but please, Auntie, what do Death Eaters do? Evan wouldn't say. He just looked angry."

Dave, who was Evan's stepfather, sighed. "I think I should...excuse me."

"So what is a Death Eater?" Brenna persisted. She didn't like not knowing things. Things never made sense if you didn't know everything about them.

"A Death Eater..." Great-Aunt Monique trailed off. "You should really talk to your father about this first."

"Just tell me what it is, please, Aunt Monique?"

"Death Eaters...they...don't, didn't, like Muggles. Or...people whose family are Muggles."

"Like Mum. And Great-Uncle Callum. Dad said he had a fight with his dad about Muggles."

"Yes," she said flatly. "Like them. They did some - some bad things. They did some bad things to Evan's family, that's why he doesn't like to talk about it. But, Brenna, it was all a very long time ago, and it doesn't matter any more. The Death Eaters are all gone. They did bad things, and...and now they don't. That's all."

"If it doesn't matter why does no one want to talk about it? And if they did bad things then where's my grandfather now? Mum said he's not dead."

"Azkaban," someone said behind Brenna, in clipped tones. Brenna jumped. It was Dad, but he didn't sound like Dad. "May I ask how this topic of conversation came up?"

"I just wanted to know what a Death Eater was, Dad," she broke in. "Sorry."

Dad's lips thinned. "I see."

Aunt Monique looked sort of embarrassed. "You can't hide these things, Theo. They just come back."

"I know that. I'd hoped -"

"Where's Azkaban?" Brenna interrupted.

Silence. "It's a prison," Dad said at length. "They keep some of the Death Eaters there. Now I think your brother is looking for you. Go and find him."

Brenna wanted to ask more questions, but the adults were all so stiff and unhappy that she couldn't find the courage to speak up. So she went to find Alf, who was trying to swing a giggling Julie around and failing, and they all spun in circles (except Julie, because she was only three) until they were dizzy, and then it was time for dinner, and there were no more questions that day.

But she knew more now. Her grandfather had been a Death Eater. And Death Eater meant someone who had done bad things. Her grandfather had done bad things, and he was in a bad place, and couldn't come and see them. But he wasn't dead. That would have been better, or less frustrating. She wanted to know what those things were he'd done, and what Azkaban was, apart from a bad place, and why he'd done them. When everyone got upset every time she asked, though, she decided not to.

* * *

She was thirteen when she found out what that truly meant. She had been reading about werewolves, and found a reference to the way they'd been treated by the Death Eaters. A carefully-worded request to Professor Longbottom had gotten her permission to look it up, even though it was in the Restricted Section - "but _only_ that," he'd admonished her. She'd nodded earnestly, having no intention of disobeying.

She knew what Death Eaters had done by now. She couldn't not have. She knew the Slytherins who tried to corner her in the corridors, the Amberleys who were her cousins, the Zabinis and the Flints; she'd learned the word _Mudblood_ when they spat it at her, and that they thought her father was a traitor. She knew that Death Eaters had fought a war, to keep wizarding blood "pure", whatever that meant, and that she was the living proof they'd lost, because her father was a pure-blood and her mother Muggle-born. She knew people had died, in the war. She knew they were evil. But that was just one word, one note. Brenna wanted to hear the symphony.

The call of her own name in the index of the book was too much for her good intentions. _Just a quick look_, she thought. _It's about my family, I'm sure it doesn't matter. _

Perhaps, she reflected much later, she had romanticised the war in her mind. She had taken her father's words, about Eric Nott wanting to do what was right for his family, and transformed them into what had not been meant; the implication that he had been a good man, probably, and the disagreement was philosophical, because how could her father have cared so much for someone...evil? A mistaken man. Just mistaken.

The book told her otherwise, in concise and grim language. Torture, and murder, and worse. There were pictures. The people in them didn't move. It took Brenna a few minutes to realise that this was because they were dead. She found the reference to her grandfather in the caption, and immediately wished she hadn't.

_The aftermath of a Death Eater attack_, it read. _Eight members of the Hayle family were killed on New Year's Eve, including three-year-old Leonora Hayle and two Hogwarts students. One other guest had returned home with her sick son and came back to find her husband and child dead. No Death Eater was convicted for this particular crime, as not enough evidence was found to link them to the scene, but Eric Nott and several others were charged with the murders. This was not one of the most gruesome or deadly attacks of the war, but a potent illustration of the careless brutality of the Death Eaters. _

Brenna slammed the book shut. Leonora Hayle. Evan's sister, Jan's daughter. Three years old. She looked like a doll in the picture, a particularly life-like one, and the thought that her own _grandfather_ might have killed her was just too horrible. The thought of Jan Flooing into the house to find it full of death - of herself, coming home, doing the same, because they called her a Mudblood in the corridors and suddenly the image in her mind's eye was Julie as a toddler, and she ran out of the Restricted Section and the library and didn't stop 'till she'd reached the safety of her dorm.

The Ravenclaw tower was one of the highest. None of her dormmates were there - it was the weekend, and they were out by the lake. She pulled open the window as far as it would go and leaned on the sill, trying to let the stiff breeze and the swiftly-changing patterns of the clouds distract her from her images printed against her eyelids. Julie dead, or maybe Mum and Dad, or Alfie, or herself. _Her own_ _grandfather_. She had his nose, everyone said so. She looked down at her hands. Did they look like his, maybe? Like the hands that had lifted a wand and killed and hurt and -

She didn't want to know.

But she wanted to know why. Why her grandfather could have done that. He hadn't been evil. Had he? Dad had said he'd wanted to do the right thing. Protect his family. He'd never talked about this. Or how he felt. She'd always wondered how he could leave home, leave everything, and suddenly it made sense. She couldn't have stayed in a house with someone who'd left that little girl Leonora lying like a rag doll on the floor.

Then again...it was Dad. He wouldn't do that. And maybe dad had thought that, too, about his father, and how could someone love you and do horrible things all at once? It didn't fit, it didn't make sense, none of it, and no amount of research or questions would tell her how. She could ask Dad, but she didn't want to. Because maybe then she'd find out her grandfather was just evil, and that would be too awful. It would mean it was in her, too, like some malevolent seed. It would tie her to that little girl, and not just because she was her cousin.

"Brenna!"

She turned around to see Jackie Corner staring at her. "Brenna, you looked like you were about to fall out the window. Did you drop something?"

Brenna blinked. "No. No, I...no. Um, Jackie, What do you think about the war?"

Jackie squinted. "Are you _sure_ you're all right?"

"I'm fine. Just - what do you think."

Jackie drew in a half-hitched breath, like she'd just realised something. "Wasn't your grandfather a Death Eater? And you were in the Restricted Section -"

Brenna folded her arms. "Yes. Actually." She knew she was mimicking her father's behaviour on the topic, and couldn't help it.

Jackie nodded. "Well, you want my opinion? Good riddance, what happened to them."

"Most likely," Brenna replied. "I was just - wondering. About his side of the story, sometimes."

"_His_ side?" Jackie seemed outraged. "They killed people - they killed my uncle - there is no other side to it! I suppose you wouldn't know better, probably been told that -"

"If you're about to insult my father, I suggest you don't. Remember this, Jackie: _my mother is Muggle-born_. I'd be dead, or never born, if the war had gone on. I just want to know why anyone would start it."

Jackie frowned. "They were evil. I mean, does there _need_ to be an explanation? Why are you asking _me_?"

"Because I need to _know_!" Brenna burst out. "I need to know why. Why my grandfather. Why my father isn't. Why anything, why everything. Just why."

"There isn't a why. They were evil, they killed people, they were stopped. The end." Jackie hesitated. "It's not - I'm sorry, you know? It's nothing to do with you. Not your fault. Let it go."

Brenna nodded, slowly. "I suppose you're right."

But she couldn't.

* * *

When she was sixteen, her grandfather died. She never learned how, or why; it was just a passing mention in a letter from her parents. A courtesy, in case someone else told her first. Brenna had thought it wouldn't matter, not someone she'd never met and never would have, but the sharp surge of emotion she felt was beyond control. Not sorrow, though; anger, for questions unanswered and wounds unhealed.

_I wanted to know_, she shouted in the silence of her head, while outside she shrugged and told her friends it was just another letter from home. _I wanted answers. I wanted to see who you were. I wanted you to apologise, or, or...I wanted you to speak to me! _

Only the silence answered. When she went home, that summer, she tried to ask her father. The words wouldn't come.

"Dad," she asked, one evening, "do...do you miss him?"

He looked up from his book, studying her face. She stilled the urge to flip her hair over her face, to try and hide. "My father, you mean. I missed him...I have missed him for thirty years. This doesn't change anything."

"But...lost opportunities?"

She knew she'd made a misstep when he shook his head firmly. "There were none, Brenna. Don't try and hold on to something that wasn't there."

"So he was just evil, and that's _it_?"

"Never!" her father snapped, and she realised she'd hit a shared sore spot. "Never that, Brenna."

"Maybe you're holding on to something that wasn't there, too, then. From what I read -"

Her father stood up. "You didn't know him. Don't try to extrapolate from the books. The people who wrote them didn't know him, either. I did. People aren't black and white. He wasn't just evil, or just good. I don't think anyone ever is - well, maybe one or two, but...never mind. He was...both. And now he's gone, so just let it be. It's not...it's not nothing to do with you, but it is the past. His sins don't fall on your shoulders, or mine, just because he's gone. He did evil things, and they were his fault. That's all there is to it."

He sounded like he was trying to convince himself.

Brenna nodded anyway. "Thanks. I mean - I just wanted to know why. And now he's dead, and I never even met him, and - did he even know I existed?"

"He knew," Dad said, sitting down again. "I don't know if - he knew. I won't lie to you, he wouldn't have been happy about your mother being, well, being your mother. But he didn't not know. I lied to him too much, when I was your age. I needed to tell him the truth about everything, after that."

It wasn't an answer, really, but it was closer to the truth than she'd been before. There had always been two pictures presented to her - her grandfather, and the Death Eater. Now they were merging into one, and she wasn't sure if she liked it. A long time ago, this had been a logical exercise. Should she want to have known him, or should she have hated his memory? But before, there'd always been the dream that she had never quite grasped. The idea that someday, somehow, she could meet Eric Nott and ask her questions to his face, and finally receive the answers. Past all the half-truth and anger and fog of war, to the man.  
That wasn't gone. There were ways of talking to the dead, after all, even if she didn't know them yet. Brenna was reluctant to take that route, though. She drew back from the idea that she was taking this too far, that she should do as her father said and let it be before it hurt her the way it had hurt her father. There were still questions, important ones. Why her father had managed to be a good person. It was Dad, and that was most of the explanation, because Dad was cutting and brusque but he wasn't evil. It wasn't a whole one. But she knew, somehow, she'd never ask him. Or not for a long while.

So she locked her last questions away, and came to another decision entirely.

"I'm going to be a reporter," she told her parents the next morning at breakfast. It was the last morning before the she and Alf and Julie went back to school, and they were having pancakes as a treat. Her fingers were sticky with lemon juice and sugar, and she had to pause to wipe them. It spoiled the effect entirely.

"Really?" Mum said diplomatically. "Why is that?"

"I'm sick of people telling stories that aren't true. I want everyone to know what the real truth is. About everything."

"I thought that was the definition of reporter," her father said blandly.

"I'm not going to tell lies. Not ever." She forestalled the gleam in her father's eye by adding "Except maybe the sort about if I took the biscuits, but you know what I mean."

Mum caught her eye, and Brenna knew she understood what she really meant. "Sometimes digging things up only causes more pain."

"But that heals. Secrets don't." The wizarding world had papered over the cracks caused by the war, in so many ways. The children of the war had grown and married and had their own children; but the old wounds hadn't quite healed. Maybe they couldn't until the last combatant had died. But pretending the war had never happened couldn't be helping, and Brenna didn't understand why so many people did just that. Didn't even bother to ask why. Because wasn't it the why that had caused the war?

* * *

She was eighteen when she found out just how her father had argued with her grandfather, and what the consequences had been.

It terrified her, made her stomach twist in knots. Leaving home was one thing, she was about to do it, but leaving not to return? Leaving your family behind? She wanted to run to her parents and hold them and promise that she wasn't going to go away like that, not ever.

She understood, now, why her father hated arguments - big arguments - with his children. He left those to Mum. Not that either of her parents liked arguing very much - but when major disagreements came up, as they did when you were a teenager and you had parents, it was Mum who thrashed them out. Dad retreated. Brenna had never quite understood why, because her father was, in his own way, one of the strongest people she knew. Certainly never someone to give up a position, once he'd taken it.

She didn't want to understand, not really. It was so much easier when your parents were...well, parents, always right even when you disagreed with them, always strong, always there for you. She didn't want to know that her father had his own fears and faults. She didn't want to realise that the easy relationship she took for granted - that family she took for granted - was something he regarded as fragile. Breakable. Something he was scared of losing, when she'd never thought it could be lost.

Brenna decided then that it was never going to be. No more pouting and no more shouting - well, she'd mostly outgrown those, but that was not the point. The point was that her father's fear could not come to pass, not for them, not for her and Alf and Julie, and it was her job to make him see that.

* * *

She was twenty-two when she went to visit Eric Nott's grave, and found it didn't matter any more. She'd promised herself this visit for years, and put it off for years as well. Then, that day, she'd been asked by the editor of the _Prophet_ to write a short feature article about the war - a space filler, of the type that didn't need much research. A "let's remember", to mark the anniversary of its end by examining its course. But not too closely, because that might be dangerous.

The sub-editor had made it sound so simple. "Just a quick piece on the war, what happened, why we shouldn't forget it, lessons it taught us. You know the drill. You can probably dig all the facts you need up from the archives. Two thousand words. I'll need it by Tuesday, for the Thursday paper."

"Can I think about it?" she'd said cautiously, stunned into evasion. "I'm not sure if I could...do it justice."

"Oh, don't be ridiculous. Tuesday."

"You're Australian, aren't you?"

"What does that have to do with anything?" he'd asked, already heading towards the door.

"You don't recognise - oh, it isn't important."

"Recognise what?" He stopped, and turned around.

"If you'd been old enough to remember the war..." She hesitated. It was public knowledge, it was the past, it didn't _matter_, but it did. "My grandfather was a Death Eater. I try to avoid the war."

"Doesn't matter who your grandfather was. You've written most of our articles about the war. You're practically our expert on it."

"No, that's Marietta Ross. She was _in_ the war, and all the rest of it."

He waved a hand. "She writes the gossip, not the facts. Anyway. Tuesday. You will do it?"

"Can I let you know tomorrow?"

He sighed. "All right, then, but first thing, you hear me?"

"Sure."

So, that evening, before her flatmates expected her home and after work had finished, she Apparated north, to Eric Nott's grave.

The gravestone was very simple; a dark granite slab. His name, the dates. Father and husband. Not beloved; she'd almost expected it, wouldn't have been surprised by it. It would have been the truth. But Theodore Nott had more tact than that, and, she supposed, more pride. He would not have put on there what his father might not have wanted, because he'd taken everything else his father had ever wanted from him.

There was no one else in the cemetery, on the crisp winter evening. The sun had set, and she pulled her cloak tighter around her, breath misting in the air. This was where it came down to; a name, a date, a slab of stone. Everything that he would _not_ be remembered for, in history, and everything that had mattered to him most. If she read her father's intent right.

She'd hoped, in her heart, for the answer to come to her the moment she saw his grave, but the silence remained, and she knew now that it would always be that way. Eric Nott had done what he'd done - the evil, and the good - for his own reasons. There were no explanations for her, no whys. He'd never even seen her face.

Or had he? She remembered a photo that had drifted under the study table, her and Alf and Julie. Torn in half, and mended. Names on the back. That had been after his death, after the return of his meagre personal effects from Azkaban. Perhaps that had been his. Perhaps it didn't matter, because, much to her surprise, she was whole without knowing. He was part of her past. But it was _past_. And he was gone, where none of them could follow, not yet. Without giving answers, but without being asked the questions.

"I forgive you," she said into the crisp air, but the words didn't sound right. Why should she have that right, to grant him forgiveness? She hadn't been born when he'd done...everything he'd done. "A little more than kin, a little less than kind"- that was what her father would have said. But it didn't apply, truly, because she'd never been given the chance to know him.

It occurred that perhaps that was what she was forgiving him for. After all the death and suffering that could be laid at his feet, it didn't seem like very much. It occurred, too, that he probably wouldn't want or accept her forgiveness; she was just a half-blood, eldest grandchild or not. But he couldn't object.

This was a wizarding cemetery, so magic went by unnoticed. The ground was covered with dead sticks and leaves, from the trees around. Transfiguration had never been her strong spot, but she could manage a flower. The lily was a bit lopsided, but, then, most real flowers weren't perfect either. It looked pretty enough, laid on the gravestone.

It was a childish piece of revenge, in many ways - announcing to the empty cemetery that she could make him, dead as he was, part of her family even if he hadn't wanted her father and mother as part of his. Then again, she was coming to realise that what the Death Eaters had lost had been what she, though then unborn, had gained. The future. Any future.

It wasn't rewriting the past, after all. Merely coming to terms with it. And next time she was home, she'd ask her father to tell her the story of those years, when he'd studied at school and run away from home and fought in a war and met and fell in love with her mother. She thought, now, she was ready to hear it.

She walked into the office the next morning, and went straight to the sub-editor. "I'll write it."

He opened his mouth, hesitated. "I already asked -"

"I'll write it. It doesn't matter. Not any more."

She went to her desk, and sat down, and pulled a sheet of parchment towards her. How to begin?

_There is a Muggle term known as "six degrees of separation". It means that everyone in the world is only separated from any other by, at most, six removes of acquaintance. Thirty years ago to this day, the war against You-Know-Who and his Death Eaters ended - but what the wizarding world has forgotten is that thirty years is only a generation, and a generation is not so long a time. We like to believe it can be safely assigned to the dustbin of history; but most of us have only six degrees of separation from it. Six degrees, or less. _


End file.
